Broliant Writes…

For several months a disagreement has been brewing between the people behind the popular WoWMatrix addon updater and the people operating several of the major addon-websites, specifically WoWInterface and Curse/WoWAce. This disagreement came to a more prominent position in the past couple of weeks when WoWMatrix was blocked from being able to access the addon websites thus meaning its users could no longer update their addons in the easy manner to which they had become accustomed.

All this has meant a heated discussion has been spawned in which much mud is being slung about and much of that mud is sticking to the alliance of addon-website owners, leaving WoWMatrix to initially appear to be the victim holding the moral high-ground. Strangely though, almost none of the reporting on this issue has presented a balanced view of the many factors involved in this matter and thus perhaps it is time to attempt to redress the balance somewhat. Let’s begin at the beginning…

Addon updaters have a fairly mature history at this point in time. One of the earliest true successes in this field was the well known and well liked WoW Ace Updater (WAU) program that was born around the time of the release of WoW’s “The Burning Crusade” (TBC) expansion. It was a product tied closely to the WoWAce website, a website that specialised in being a repository for ‘ACE’ based addons – that is, WoW addons written using special software components known as the Ace framework – essentially a toolkit for writing high quality, consistent addons.

WAU was a huge success and in fact, a success that its authors had never intended it to be. Designed really to be a convenience tool for those using Ace based addons, it quickly became so popular that many WoW players elected to build custom user-interfaces for the game using only Ace based addons. This meant that they could then update all their addons simply by running WAU and hitting an “update all” button. Before this was possible, updating addons was a manual task, requiring a player to visit the download page for each addon they had installed, looking for any new releases. This was borderline acceptable at the best of times and at the worst of times (read: patchdays) it was a nightmare of horrendous frustration.

Thus, in very little time, the user-base of WAU increased exponentially and drove up the bandwidth usage of the WoWAce website which was hosting all the addons at a similarly exponential rate. Where updating addons had previously had a significant personal time-cost, it was now so easy and convenient that many of WAU’s users would think nothing of running the client to update all their addons every day, or even multiple times per day. The cost of this increased bandwidth was staggering to put it mildly.

In order to try and offset the expense of this bandwith, the WoWAce developers and admins attempted various strategies ranging from asking for donations to inserting an advertising banner into the WAU client. None of these schemes worked well enough to meet the costs of the bandwidth and so other means were continually being sought.

During the same time-period, WoWMatrix was launched and offered several features that the WAU program appeared to lack, principally the ability to update addons held on multiple addon websites where the WAU program could only update addons held on the WoWAce website. This was attractive to many people simply because there are many great addons not based on the Ace framework that is the defining facet of the WoWAce website.

Eventually, the WoWAce site managers managed to make a deal with the managers of the Curse website through which Curse would meet the cost of the WoWAce bandwidth. This was enough to keep the WoWAce website up and running and to enable WAU to continue operating but the admins behind WoWAce explained early on that it was simply a stop-gap solution and that a proper solution needed to be found if WoWAce was not to be shut-down as a repository of addons in the longer term.

At this fairly early time in the history of this dispute, the practices that WoWMatrix has been soundly villified for over time were beginning to be recognised. Primarily, most addon websites show advertising on their websites so that when a player visits their site to find and download an addon, they have a chance to see the advertising and that potentially generates revenue for the website. WoWMatrix fostered an approach of scraping the addon websites to gather the details of the addons being offered and then propagated that information through its client.

In essence therefore, when a user elected to install an addon using WoWMatrix, WoWMatrix simply grabbed the addon from the hosting website and then installed it on behalf of the user. This behaviour was not appreciated or liked by the owners of the addon sites hosting the addons because it was costing them bandwidth to supply the downloads and yet the WoWMatrix users were never visiting their website and were thus, never generating any potential advertising revenue to offset those bandwidth costs. WoWMatrix meanwhile was running its own advertising within its client and was thereby generating revenue off of the bandwidth it was using.

Worse was to come though when WoWMatrix began updating their client to alter the addons before installing them onto user’s computers. Some addons contained links that would be shown in-game to users inviting satisfied users the opportunity to donate small sums to the addon’s author to help the author continue to support and develop the addon. WoWMatrix began modifying some of these addons to alter the links shown to users such that any donations made did not go to the addon’s authors. Guess where those donations went instead?

WoWMatrix also edited addon “headers” to give the impression that the version being installed was more up-to-date than it actually was. This often seemed to occur when WoWMatrix could not find a working source for an addon and presumably gave its users a false impression of the level of success WoWMatrix was having updating their addons.

Whilst all this was occurring, those users that noticed this behaviour did not remain quiet and much evidence to support all of the above information is freely available from multiple sources on the web. The WoWMatrix team remained firmly silent and did not respond to its detractors – a policy that is generally the same today.

In late Spring of 2008, the WoWAce team announced that due to the fact that it had not been possible to find alternative forms of sustainable funding, they had instead reached a new agreement with the owners of the Curse website. Regarded as an effective “buyout” of WoWAce by Curse, the stated outcome was that the authors of the WAU program would begin working on a similar type of client for Curse whilst simultanously making adjustments to integrate the WoWAce site more tightly with Curse’s website.

Once the core of this work had been completed, it was announced, the intention was to turn off the ability for users to download Ace addons from WoWAce and instead they would be directed to a corresponding download page on the Curse website. The WAU program would be both discontinued and disabled and users wishing to continue having “automatic updating” would need to transition over to using the Curse Client instead.

The timeframe for all this to happen was roughly stated as “July/August 2008″ and in actual reality, it took a fair while longer until all the pieces were in place. Thus, users of WAU got to persist in using WAU for several additional months before it was finally switched off in September 2008. When this happened, many users did indeed encounter difficulties because the embryonic Curse Client had many faults which created problems for its users. However, the range of addons available from the Curse website was far wider than “just Ace based addons” therefore the transitioning users did gain this improved functionality for their troubles.

Shortly after the switchover the WoWAce people who were now essentially working for Curse also announced that they were planning to launch a premium service based around the full functionality of the Curse Client once it was fully developed as the means by which the bandwidth costs of updating addons would be fully met. Meanwhile, the various “perceived crimes” of the WoWMatrix client continued unabated and its operators remained tightlipped and silent.

It took several months of continued development before the Curse Client reached a point at which its users could consider it to be “working as intended” but throughout the development time, its authors interacted frequently with its users via the WoWAce forums, providing insight and feedback that kept the Curse Client users informed about the progress of the development.

All of the above is essentially the backstory of the events that have led up to the recent culmination of this ongoing disagreement between WoWMatrix and the owners of several popular addon websites. After pursuing numerous other avenues, the owners of Curse and WoWInterface finally bit the bullet in recent weeks and enacted measures on their respective websites that effectively blocked WoWMatrix from being able to download addons from their sites.

This has meant that the many players that use WoWMatrix have suddenly found themselves unable to automatically update their addons and in concert with this fact, the release of Patch 3.1 and its subsequent 3.1.x mini-patches has meant that players have been stuck with outdated addons. At the same time, Curse has reached the point where its Curse Client addon updater is now mature enough that they can finally launch their premium service as a means of generating revenue. The coincidence of these two events, although not even slightly surprising to those that have followed this matter closely, has been seen by the many other people that have not been following this matter as a crude business practice on the behalf of Curse.

The natural irritation and frustration of the denied users of WoWMatrix has led to the slinging of all kinds of insults and false claims against Curse and its Curse Client which have been broadly repeated ad-infinitum by the wider WoW reporting community (read: blogs and bloggers and podcasters) without any proper research being done to gain the facts that balance the story. Even today, all of the above information is still available via the WoWAce forum threads that have been running in several cases for several years.

It often appears the the name “Curse” is being used as a noun for “untrustworthy” which in this affair simply cannot be justified. Barbs levelled against Curse and its Curse Client include but have not been limited to the following claims:

• Curse cannot be trusted, WoWMatrix is much more trustworthy.
• The Curse Client is full of Keyloggers.
• The Curse Client is buggy and does not work.

Given that the Curse Client is being developed in a fairly open manner by Kaeltan who is not only “the father of WoWAce” but also a respected developer of numerous popular WoW addons himself and the fact that he is responding regularly to posts made in the WoWAce forums on many topics including the development of the Curse Client, claiming that Curse cannot be trusted is to claim that Kaeltan cannot be trusted and on prior experience and knowledge, that claim just does not ring true.

However, the complete lack of any kind of response, interaction or feedback from the team that produce WoWMatrix (see – we can’t even tell you who these people are!) is far more grounds for supporting a counter claim that WoWMatrix are untrustworthy. Furthermore, given that WoWMatrix has indulged in practices that are clearly against the better interests of the addon community itself, such claims become quite laughable.

Equally, claiming that the Curse Client contains keyloggers is also highly suspect. With such an openness in the WoWAce community between many very experienced and knowledgeable developers, a keylogger in the client would be found and announced with almost zero lead time. There are simply too many critical eyes on the Curse Client project to keep it honest in all respects. Again, compare and contrast this with WoWMatrix.

Finally, it can fully be agreed that the initial versions of the Curse Client were buggy and had errors that made using it highly annoying. However, all of these issues can be seen to be reported and documented on the WoWAce forums and there are responses to most of them from Kaeltan and others demonstrating what progress was being made to address them. As a result, the current version of the Curse Client works exactly as it should and is a very solid and polished product as a result.

It is also tightly integrated with the Curse website therefore if one browses the Curse website and sees and addon that looks interesting, it is a matter of clicking a single “Install via Curse Client” button on the addon’s webpage and the Curse Client does all the heavy lifting.

WoWMatrix recently made a “public ‘FAQ’ announcement” in which it appeared to repell many of the arguments that had been made by Curse, WoWAce, WoWInterface and others about its prior practices. However, the community response to this announcement has generally appeared to have been rather cool, as a great many of the claims made by WoWMatrix have been rebutted successfully.

Thus it is that at this point in the story, we approach the end of the tale. Now blocked from directly accessing many of the hosting addon websites, it appears that WoWMatrix is attempting to keep its head above water by hosting addons for itself and is inviting authors to upload their addons to the site. How successful this proves to be remains to be seen. But what should be clear and apparent after reading the above, no matter how annoyed or irritated one might be as a WoWMatrix user that no longer has such an easy life, the claims made thus far against Curse/WoWAce/WoWInterface/et-al have held little to no truth and instead simply reflect the poor understanding and research of those claimants.

-B-

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This post was based upon an original comment made in response to a post made at “The Instance! World of Warcraft Podcast” blog.

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